A DISTANT VOICE: A Call From Tricia Romano From L.A.

[cpnews]

“I’d move to Los Angeles if New Zealand and Australia were swallowed up by a tidal wave, if there was a bubonic plague in England, and if the continent of Africa disappeared from some Martian attack.†- RUSSELL CROWE

“I love Los Angeles. I love Hollywood. They're beautiful. Everybody's plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic.†- ANDY WARHOL

TRICIA ROMANO is the former writer of ‘Fly Life’ a nightlife centric column that used to be in the Village Voice, a paper I used to read. I still tune in to Michael Musto’s column once in awhile, but not like back in the day. There was a time when staying up late on Tuesday to get the Voice was a social necessity. I had to read what Michael felt about this or that, him or her, and what was being whispered in dark corners by creatures of the night. Tricia’s column, for awhile, presented a different viewpoint and I became a regular reader of her as well. I also was a secret source for her as I was of course not yet a blogger, and found myself with a scoop now and then. Tricia and I had some sushi dinners where we discussed me writing this sort of stuff. I thought the Voice might be right for me but didn’t like the editorial interference that defines most magazines and newspapers, and I eventually opted for the free form of the blog. Yeah, so now you know who to blame. I would like to thank Tricia for giving me advice and confidence to give it a try. This interview was done via phone as she now lives in L.A. She makes me read her Defamer online posts, and I’m finding out all about the left coast. A lot of my friends are making the move, settling in Venice and Echo Park, and places with even weirder names than Brooklyn. This town ain’t what it used to be and it’s becoming hard to argue that our culture is better than anyone else’s. Still, I hang on to as much of the old New York as I can still find. I get my egg creams and rickeys from Ray’s on Avenue A, my pizza from Ray’s on Prince Street, and even though I can’t afford the calories, very often I still pop into Luger’s or Katz’s when I need a fix. September is sporting a whole bunch of new clubs with new approaches, and I am still optimistic that there is something happening here…

Steve Lewis: I’m here with Tricia Romano, a dear friend of mine. She has been, among other things, the writer of Fly Life for the Village Voice, and now she has moved to LA. Tricia why don’t you give us a little bit of your background?

Tricia Romano: I officially moved to New York in 1999 after I originally had come to New York for a few months as an intern at Village Voice in 1997, where I interned for Frank Owen.

SL: And you’re laughing about Frank Owen because Frank Owen and I have beef.

TR: I know you guys have beef. I’m staying out of it.

SL: I have beef with Frank Owen, who was supposed to be my friend, but instead of being a friend when I needed him most, Frank Owen actually wrote something that was completely untrue and unnecessary. When I confronted him about it, he said he would correct it in the London release of his book, which did me no good at the time. I’ll get into that at another time, but yeah, Frank turned his back on me when I needed him most, and that’s the facts. So anyway, you worked for Frank Owen, and that’s over at the Village Voice.

TR: Yes, we were fellow nightlife people. He did actual investigative reporting on nightlife so I was really excited to work with him, and definitely learned some things from him. But then I went back to Seattle where I had been living before my internship, and worked for the Seattle Weekly for about a year and a half before I came back to New York. I originally came to New York for CMJ Magazine which lasted about six weeks, until I got a phone call from The Voice. They had a couple openings, and I jumped at the chance to go over there. I was initially a fact checker, and then I was a columnist writing short nightlife listings. Then about a year after that, myself and a fellow writer, Jose Germosen, were asked to come in and do a column about clubs and nightlife. Apparently our marketing department had done a survey, and discovered that our readership had gotten a little bit older than desired, so we were asked to bring the youth market back into the fold.

SL: Michael Musto’s was perceived as the nightlife column, but his column had evolved into a little bit more than a nightlife column. It was not dealing with that everyday issue kind of thing, so they wanted to fill in a niche for that younger crowd, yes?

TR: Right. It was a little weird because in our mind, Michael Musto was the person who was already doing that. When they described the column, they actually sold it to us as being kind of like this column that a woman out of L.A. was doing at OC Weekly, Commie Girl. We read it and then kinda looked at each other and were like, ‘But don’t we already have somebody on staff who does this?’ So then we asked Musto if he knew about it and he didn’t. He was really upset, which made us upset that he was upset. In the end it was explained that we would not touch on similar things, that we would concentrate more on the music aspect of nightlife and much.

SL: And that column was called Fly Life.

TR: The columns called Fly Life; Jose had a half page and I had a half page. Eventually Jose left and I was doing the column on my own. It was a half page for a couple of years and then ran as a full page for the last year I was working on it. That was a really good year as my editor Rob Harvilla wanted more club coverage, and really supported it.

SL: Fly Life was basically how we met. You would call me up. In fact, I was a secret source for many of your stories. I guess, right? Now I’m revealing myself…

TR: Yeah.

SL: You’re laughing, but you as a writer, are not supposed to reveal your sources.

TR: You’re like a crystal ball. You and Matty Silver are like little crystal balls. It was very fun. I remember it was 2002 or 2003 and we were at Baktun for a Cabaret Law meeting.

SL: Yes.

TR: And it was like, you know, all the lunatics, some of whom were really on it, and the other ones who weren’t making any sense. But you were there while they were having this big meeting, you and Matty turned to me and said, ‘This whole area is going to be like Miami.’

SL: I was referring to the Meatpacking District, I was a predicting the future that was known to me.

TR: Right, it was the Meatpacking District and the 20s, 30s area on the West Side. You two were like, ‘This is going to be the center; they’re going to zone it to be the center of nightlife, and it’s going to be huge,’ and I was like, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah.’ You know, cause I thought, ‘Who’s going to go all the way out there?’ And what do you know? About a year later Crobar was announced, then Marquee, and before you knew it, the Meatpacking District had arrived. I could not believe my eyes.

SL: Well that’s what happened. In all fairness, a lot of people were in the same position as me, where you have a little bit of knowledge and could apply it to what the city is trying to do. I had an advantage also, as I was going to be designing Marquee, so I knew that Marquee was moving in there with Noah and Jason. That was in its’ early conceptual stages, I knew about the area being developed. I also knew that Crobar was coming in from Miami because groups that I knew about wanted to take over that Mezmor building, and I knew they were going to get it. Amy Sacco, being the leader in that area, I knew that the outer Chelsea thing was going to happen, and certainly the Meatpacking. I gotta give that to Jeffery Jah, who actually told me that was happening. When he was looking into the Lotus space, he took me around to meet realtors and the spaces were incredible. At that time, they were out of the way. It doesn’t take a crystal ball, it just takes a little bit of knowledge. But thanks, I appreciate it. And that is how our relationship grew because as I would tell you things off the record, or as an anonymous source, and they turned out to be true. You and I developed a mutual respect, and I would always tell you I wanted to one day become a writer, and I guess this Good Night Mr. Lewis blog is a result of that.

TR: You have so many stories, it’s amazing. I think my favorite story is the one where you’re getting shot at, at the World.

SL: Oh yeah. I’ll tell that story, that’s another Jeffery Jah story. I don’t actually tell that story often…

Val: Let’s hear it.

SL: Well Jeffery Jah tells the story better than me, because I’m a little confused on what happened as I was in the middle of it. But apparently there were some people shooting at some other people outside the World on East 2nd Street. It was a summer night, and I had walked outside. Now I have a really big yawn cause I’m up all the time, as everyone around here knows; I do like two hours of sleep a night. So I walked out of the building on that summer night and I yawned really hard, and when I do that, my ears shut down. Apparently I had walked right into a shootout, and there were bullets flying all around me, and Jeffery says he looked over and he saw the bullets flying all over while I just stood there yawning. It was all over in a few seconds and everybody thought, ‘My God, he’s just standing there being shot at and he’s yawning at them.’ But the reality of it was that I just didn’t know it was happening.

TR: That’s a great one.

SL: Yeah. What’s it like living in L.A.?

TR: Oh, it’s awesome.

SL: It’s awesome? I mean, is it really cool? I can’t imagine as I’m a New Yorker. You wrote New York nightlife as well so I want your perspective.

TR: Well it’s perfect every single day. There are no thunderstorms, lightning, snowstorms, cold weather, nothing. I can’t stand any of that. I work from home and live by the beach, and I drive a pretty minimal amount. I’m from Las Vegas so this is not a foreign concept to me, this lifestyle. It is just way more mellow, this lifestyle is way more relaxed. The most interesting part about L.A. is that there’s so many different neighborhoods; so many different parts of town. It’s just like New York in the sense that you get to go around and explore every one of them, just experiencing what each has to offer.

SL: You were over New York and you were over New York nightlife when you left.

TR: I honestly really hated it.

SL: And that’s pretty bad, when the nightlife writer for the Village Voice is hating nightlife.

TR: Well after a while, I hated going out. I was thirty-five or whatever, and I didn’t really feel like spending my hours at two in the morning with people that I can’t really understand what they’re saying, because it’s so loud. God I sound old; I’ve been doing it since I was about seventeen in Las Vegas. I was writing about them back then when I was in college at the University of Nevada, and that continued when I went to UW in Seattle. I was writing about nightlife even then, reporting on crack downs at the clubs. We had all those S&M clubs in Seattle. There was a club in Seattle called Catwalk that was having S&M parties, doing piercings and tattooing which was against health code. They were raiding these kinds of clubs and trying to shut them down. I was doing all of this back in my early twenties, so by the time I was doing Fly Life, none of my friends could or wanted to go out with me anymore. I would be leaving my house at midnight or 1 o’clock on a Wednesday, it would be twenty degrees outside, and I’d be lugging my heavy cameras around. You can’t really get drunk or even a little wasted cause you have to be kind of lucid and aware of the pictures you’re taking, and of what people are saying.

SL: Yeah, welcome to my world. It was the same with running them, I had to stay sober. What’s the difference between New York nightlife and L.A. nightlife?

TR: I mean, I haven’t really done the L.A. nightlife per say. I went to one party called Mustache Mondays which was very New York-y. I wrote something about it for Defamer.com, and in fact there were a lot of people there from New York - Mario Diaz who ran The Cock.

SL: Wow, Mario was there?

TR: Mario’s in L.A. now.

SL: Yeah I forgot, say hi for me.

TR: Yeah, I will, I love him. But yeah it was all like drag queens and house music and weird performance art type of stuff.

SL: So you felt at home? You felt like it was good because it was like New York. Is it that you have not yet acclimated into what an L.A. party is, that you’re not traveling at that speed?

TR: Well, I think that there is a stereotypical notion of what an L.A. party is, and then there’s the reality of what an L.A. party is. Just like anything, there’s the cheesy clubs in Hollywood that you can go to and I guess call that an LA party, but there’s also all the East Side parties; all the Silver Lake and Los Feliz parties. They’re like the East Village, or they’re like Capitol Hill in Seattle…

SL: Downtown. It’s a downtown vibe?

TR: They’re sort of common thread, you know. They’re the edgier, more underground side of things. But the pictures of those parties aren’t in Us Weekly, so people don’t really realize that they’re here. And one of the things that I find to be really hysterical is when people are like, ‘Everybody in L.A. is dumb. Or you know, L.A.’s too shallow etc.’ I can’t even tell you how many of the people that I know out here who have moved from New York. Also people that I’ve met that I didn’t know when I got here are from New York. So it’s funny cause New Yorkers are essentially what half of L.A. is comprised of.

SL: You know, my perception of L.A. comes from that movie A Night at the Roxbury, that’s about what I think of when I think of L.A. nightlife. I’m sorry that that’s the case, but it’s actually one of my favorite movies, I thought it was great.

TR: That’s funny

SL: And that’s my perception of L.A. nightlife. I hear that song and think of those posers bobbing there heads and I feel so culturally superior. I used to travel a lot, I don’t very much anymore. I used to think that Paris was closer in almost every way except for the language, than L.A. Los Angeles to me was far more foreign an experience than Paris was.

TR: Yeah, that’s true. Well, I mean it’s not foreign to me because of I grew up like this, as I was saying earlier. I grew up in a place where it was warm and everything was wide open and spread apart and you’re in your car driving all the time. The major difference is that L.A. actually does have culture and cool stuff going on, whereas Vegas, especially when I was growing up, was absolutely a dead zone, I mean there was nothing.

SL: Yeah my environmental theory is to turn off the lights in Vegas for a week and we’ll save all the oil, gas, and electricity this country needs for a year. I really do hate Vegas. I don’t like L.A. much, but I really dislike Vegas. What have you been up to recently?

TR: Well this past weekend I went out to this weekly film screening that was really fun called Cinespia. I wrote about it for Defamer yesterday.

SL: I read it.

TR: They have a series of film sessions and screenings every weekend. They do it outside of the Hollywood Forever cemetery, which is a famous cemetery in Hollywood.

SL: Yeah I read that, it sounded great. I actually wanna go but I have to go to L.A. to do it. It sounds amazing.

TR: Yeah. You have to go there early though, score your spot and picnic with food and wine and such. They project the movie on this huge wall.

SL: I’ve never eaten in a cemetery. I’ve never seen a film in a century…hmmmm.

Good Night,

Mr. Lewis

Interview conducted and written by Steve Lewis.

Interview has been edited and condensed by Jessica Tocko.

Check back on Thursday for the second half of Steve's conversation with Tricia Romano as they explore her work now that she has moved to the west coast, as well as her many awards and acclamations throughout her career.

More...